Drives Monitor

Drives Monitor is a widget for your Windows desktop. Its interface displays useful information about the usage of your hard drive disks, as well as an activity graph for each.
Drives Monitor cannot work on its own: it requires you to install a piece of software able to handle GADGET files. For this review, I used the program Special edition sidebar created by Igor "Igogo" Bushin, and it was able to correctly run this gadget.

A first look at this desktop widget left me confused. A lot of information is displayed, and it's hard at first to understand what each piece of data means. Fortunately, Drives Monitor features a complete settings window that enables you to disable any elements from its interface. Yet, the configuration interface has a huge number of parameters. You will most likely need to spend some time in order to find the setting that you are looking for.

Another drawback of Drives Monitor lies in its CPU usage. On my computer, it used between two and five percent of the CPU time. This is not much, but one would expect a widget to be lighter on the CPU.

To sum it up, Drives Monitor is a good gadget that helps you to check the status of your hard drives with a quick glance. Yet, its complicated interface might need you to take some time to configure it to your liking.